Media History Project
mediahst@umn.edu

1860-1869

  • 1860: Pony Express carries mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento.
  • 1860: Dickens’ Great Expectations.
  • 1860: Panoramic photography is improved by using curved glass plates.
  • 1860: 260 magazines are published in the United States.
  • 1860: “Dime novels,” printed on cheap, rough paper, sell well.
  • 1860: New York Herald creates the first “morgue” of newspaper clippings.
  • 1860: Frenchman Rene Dagron invents “microfilm” technique using glass plates.
  • 1860: Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.
  • 1860: The first aerial photographs are taken from a balloon over Paris.
  • 1861: The first American Ph.D. is awarded by Yale University.
  • 1861: German inventor J.P. Reis demonstrates a kind of electric telephone.
  • 1861: Charles Reade’s picaresque novel, The Cloister and the Hearth.
  • 1861: Telegraph brings Pony Express to an abrupt end.
  • 1861: Julia Ward Howe composes “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
  • 1861: Kinematoscope by U.S. inventor Coleman Sellers, is a crude movie projector.
  • 1861: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) publishes her best loved novel, Silas Marner.
  • 1861: First chemical means to color photography.
  • 1861: Mathew Brady and others begin to photograph the American Civil War.
  • 1861: Aerial balloonist sends telegraph message.
  • 1861: Heliostat message, using sun and a mirror, sent 90 miles at Lake Superior.
  • 1861: Patent issued for a single-lens reflex camera.
  • 1861: James Clerk Maxwell shows that red, green, and blue are the primary colors.
  • 1862: Verdi stages his opera La Forza del Destino.
  • 1862: In Italy, Caselli sends a drawing over a wire.
  • 1862: Ivan Turgenev’s nihilist novel, Fathers and Sons.
  • 1862: In the U.S., paper money.
  • 1862: Jean-Auguste Ingres paints The Turkish Bath.
  • 1862: The first of philosopher Herbert Spencer’s 10 volumes of Principles.
  • 1862: Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
  • 1863: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, arguably history’s greatest speech.
  • 1863: William Bullock invents the rotary web-fed letterpress.
  • 1863: Edward Everett Hale, The Man Without a Country.
  • 1863: Early phonograph: a machine that records what a piano plays.
  • 1863: The Football Association Laws lets everyone play the same game.
  • 1863: Painter Edouard Manet shocks with nude Luncheon on the Grass.
  • 1863: Typotelegraph sends fax messages between London and Liverpool.
  • 1863: Large U.S. cities get free home delivery of mail.
  • 1863: First international postal conference held in Paris.
  • 1864: “Railway post office” sorts mail on trains.
  • 1864: Innocenzo Manzetti invents what may be a telephone; seeks no patent.
  • 1864: Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend.
  • 1864: Maxwell publishes electromagnetic theory that leads to radio wave discovery.
  • 1864: Postal money orders sold in U.S; $1.3 million in 6 months.
  • 1864: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
  • 1865: Experimental photograph is developed inside a camera.
  • 1865: “Lewis Carroll” publishes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
  • 1865: Mark Twain gets fame with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
  • 1865: In Paris, the beginnings of the International Telegraph Union.
  • 1865: Two San Francisco newspapers, Examiner and Chronicle publish.
  • 1865: Botanist Gregor Mendel, writing on heredity, begins science of genetics.
  • 1865: Louis Pasteur publishes his theory that germs spread disease.
  • 1865: West Virginian Mahlon Loomis manages a kind of wireless communication.
  • 1865: After adult novels mailed to Civil War troops, Congress votes obscenity law.
  • 1865: Paris and Berlin build networks of pneumatic tube telegram delivery.
  • 1865: Most U.S. states have laws guaranteeing tax-based public education.
  • 1865: Pantelegraph transmits faxes commercially between Paris and Lyon.
  • 1865: Web offset press prints both side of a continuous roll of paper at once.
  • 1866: Western Union dominates U.S. wires.
  • 1866: In Sweden, before the Nobel Prizes, Alfred Nobel invents dynamite.
  • 1866: Photos of Yosemite Valley will help pass laws to protect U.S. scenic places.
  • 1866: In Prague, The Bartered Bride, an opera by Bedrich Smetana, is staged.
  • 1866: Atlantic cable ties Europe and U.S. for instant communication.
  • 1866: Prussia uses telegraph to coordinate its armies in war against Austria.
  • 1866: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
  • 1866: The Black Crook, a musical play, foreshadows musical comedies.
  • 1867: Christopher Sholes of Wisconsin builds a Type-Writer.
  • 1867: Double-column advertising in newspapers.
  • 1867: Karl Marx publishes Das Kapital.
  • 1867: Johann Strauss’ waltz, The Blue Danube.
  • 1867: The West sees Japanese art at the Paris Exposition.
  • 1867: Prussia nationalizes Taxis mail service.
  • 1867: Charles Gound’s opera, Romeo and Juliet.
  • 1867: Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women.
  • 1867: Henrik Ibsen’s drama, Peer Gynt.
  • 1867: Wagner’s opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
  • 1867: The first Japanese magazine, Seiyo Zasshi (The Western Magazine).
  • 1868: A communication necessity: the stapler.
  • 1868: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
  • 1868: Start of Allyn & Bacon, book publishers.
  • 1868: Edward Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor.
  • 1868: U.S. government for the first time tries to define obscenity.
  • 1868: Thomas Edison patents a vote recorder.
  • 1868: In Philadelphia, the N.W. Ayer & Son full-service advertising agency.
  • 1868: Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony is well received. He is 28.
  • 1869: From France, color photography, using the subtractive method.
  • 1869: Cardiff Giant hoax inspires comment, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
  • 1869: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is published.
  • 1869: Horatio Alger begins publishing rags-to-riches novels.
  • 1869: Biologist Thomas Huxley coins the term “agnostic.”
  • 1869: The American Women’s Home best-selling book of household advice.
  • 1869: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, On the Subjection of Women.
  • 1869: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy labels him “the apostle of culture.”
  • 1869: From Austria, postcards.
  • 1869: Edison patents stock ticker and printing telegraph.
  • 1869: Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad.
  • 1869: James Russell Lowell, The Cathedral.
  • 1869: John Hyatt’s invention of celluloid will lead to phonograph records, telephones.
  • 1869: The People’s Literary Companion, the first mail-order periodical.
  • 1869: American Newspaper Directory estimates newspaper circulation.